Two Bookstores
Great cities are like great books that must be re-read to savor their full intensity; the more one spends time with them, the more they reveal their secrets. Both serve as pivots around which various cogs of our inner machinery grind. We end up seeing the cities and books we love as a reflection of ourselves, and ourselves as a reflection, however opaque, of some aspect of their streets or pages. These truths may well take a lifetime to unfold—thus the impulse to return to our favorites time and time again, to dive into the grid of well-worn pages and the maze of already-trodden streets.
It’s no surprise, then, that great bookstores are generally found in great cities; some serve a specific neighborhood (philosophy and literary criticism near a university, Black history in Harlem, film history in Hollywood, etc.) or reflect something unique about it, while at the same time transcending it. City Lights is such a place. It couldn’t be anywhere else—it’s the soul of North Beach—but it’s a world-class bookstore. When I lived in North Beach, it was a haven when I sought inspiration or a creative spark, which often came in the form of another Kerouac novel or volume of Beat poetry quickly taken to a coffee shop or bar to be read.
When I moved to Manhattan I sought out similar bookstores. The almost incessant movement here is tiring, and a good bookstore is a respite from the fracas, a way to find refuge from various purveyors—human and other—of loudness. One such store, Three Lives, is on a quiet corner in Greenwich Village, just off Seventh Avenue near Christopher Street. The façade is brick, the building unimposing, the front door creaky. New books are pressed against the windows from inside like beckoning faces. There is no hint of the disarray—or the dust—one finds in some small bookshops. New cloth titles line one front wall inside, new paperback titles another. There is a small section devoted to New York, and a back area, one small step up, where walls filled with fiction, poetry, and travel books surround a table where artfully designed paperbacks from boutique publishers lie face up, encouraging impulse buying. Seeing a book’s cover and not a spine does the trick sometimes. There is a small bench tucked into a corner. The cash register is in a slightly elevated nook that could be mistaken for a pulpit were it not for the green glow of a computer screen. You could cross the length of the shop in ten or twelve steps, but one is not likely to take that many in succession. The proprietors can’t prevent people from being rushed, but they do everything in their power to impede manifestations of pace. The effort largely succeeds.
Part of the reason I love Three Lives, and buy a good number of books there, has to do with a San Francisco bookstore—one that has been gone for about a decade now.
Tillman Place Books once occupied a small storefront on the street of the same name—an alley, really—off Grant Avenue just before its leap into Chinatown. The store was about the same size as Three Lives, but narrower and tighter. A cat roamed around when it wasn’t dozing in the window. Since space was a rare commodity, one had the sense that every title earned its shelf space by passing an entrance exam of which the parameters were both obvious and unstated. The rigors of such testing—in other words, the owner’s vision—can make or break an independent bookseller.
Regular customers could do something unheard of just about anywhere else: walk away with some books and be billed for them. And there would usually be more than one; a customer coming in for a specific title could easily leave with several others—which in the end is the whole point of shops like Tillman Place and Three Lives. They serve to spark a reader’s varying interests, to remind him that while Topic A is on the front burner, he’d always wanted to read more about Topic B—which leads in turn to Topic C. Plug in anything you want there: Fiction, history, biography, music, art.
In the fall of 1999 I received a card in the mail, accompanied by a photo of Tillman Place Books and a copy of an Elizabeth Bishop poem about loss. The note informed customers the store had closed. It came as no surprise; the owner had long felt he was losing ground to the Borders a few blocks away, and to people who came in to look but went home to their computers to buy. Which is why across the country, in a small bookstore in New York, I don’t just browse—I take my new finds to the cash register and pay for them on the spot.
It’s no surprise, then, that great bookstores are generally found in great cities; some serve a specific neighborhood (philosophy and literary criticism near a university, Black history in Harlem, film history in Hollywood, etc.) or reflect something unique about it, while at the same time transcending it. City Lights is such a place. It couldn’t be anywhere else—it’s the soul of North Beach—but it’s a world-class bookstore. When I lived in North Beach, it was a haven when I sought inspiration or a creative spark, which often came in the form of another Kerouac novel or volume of Beat poetry quickly taken to a coffee shop or bar to be read.
When I moved to Manhattan I sought out similar bookstores. The almost incessant movement here is tiring, and a good bookstore is a respite from the fracas, a way to find refuge from various purveyors—human and other—of loudness. One such store, Three Lives, is on a quiet corner in Greenwich Village, just off Seventh Avenue near Christopher Street. The façade is brick, the building unimposing, the front door creaky. New books are pressed against the windows from inside like beckoning faces. There is no hint of the disarray—or the dust—one finds in some small bookshops. New cloth titles line one front wall inside, new paperback titles another. There is a small section devoted to New York, and a back area, one small step up, where walls filled with fiction, poetry, and travel books surround a table where artfully designed paperbacks from boutique publishers lie face up, encouraging impulse buying. Seeing a book’s cover and not a spine does the trick sometimes. There is a small bench tucked into a corner. The cash register is in a slightly elevated nook that could be mistaken for a pulpit were it not for the green glow of a computer screen. You could cross the length of the shop in ten or twelve steps, but one is not likely to take that many in succession. The proprietors can’t prevent people from being rushed, but they do everything in their power to impede manifestations of pace. The effort largely succeeds.
Part of the reason I love Three Lives, and buy a good number of books there, has to do with a San Francisco bookstore—one that has been gone for about a decade now.
Tillman Place Books once occupied a small storefront on the street of the same name—an alley, really—off Grant Avenue just before its leap into Chinatown. The store was about the same size as Three Lives, but narrower and tighter. A cat roamed around when it wasn’t dozing in the window. Since space was a rare commodity, one had the sense that every title earned its shelf space by passing an entrance exam of which the parameters were both obvious and unstated. The rigors of such testing—in other words, the owner’s vision—can make or break an independent bookseller.
Regular customers could do something unheard of just about anywhere else: walk away with some books and be billed for them. And there would usually be more than one; a customer coming in for a specific title could easily leave with several others—which in the end is the whole point of shops like Tillman Place and Three Lives. They serve to spark a reader’s varying interests, to remind him that while Topic A is on the front burner, he’d always wanted to read more about Topic B—which leads in turn to Topic C. Plug in anything you want there: Fiction, history, biography, music, art.
In the fall of 1999 I received a card in the mail, accompanied by a photo of Tillman Place Books and a copy of an Elizabeth Bishop poem about loss. The note informed customers the store had closed. It came as no surprise; the owner had long felt he was losing ground to the Borders a few blocks away, and to people who came in to look but went home to their computers to buy. Which is why across the country, in a small bookstore in New York, I don’t just browse—I take my new finds to the cash register and pay for them on the spot.
posted by Paul Bennett at 7:28 PM
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